=8. His Home Life.=――At the age of thirty-three he had married. We do not know much of his wife beyond the facts that she was young and blue-eyed. The first few years of the marriage were very happy years, spent in a small house in the outskirts of Berlin――for by this time Mendelssohn’s friends had procured for him the privilege, not at that time, nor for long after, generally accorded to Jews, of living in whatever part of the city he liked. It was a modest little house, with a garden. The ornaments were perhaps rather out of proportion in size and number to the rest of the surroundings, but that was hardly the fault of the newly married couple, since one of the smaller vexations imposed on the Jews of that time was the obligation laid on every Jewish bridegroom to treat himself to a large quantity of china for the good of the king’s manufactory. It was, of course, a sort of extra tax legally imposed upon Jews, but the most vexatious part of it was, that neither the tastes of the purchaser nor his wants were ever considered. He had to buy just what the manufactory wanted to sell. In this instance twenty life-sized china apes fell to Mendelssohn’s lot. But the ugly ornaments notwithstanding, Mendelssohn and his wife were very happy. Happier perhaps as husband and wife than, when their children grew up, as father and mother. Parenthood was a very hard task in those days. It is never quite easy, but a century ago, when Jews could not walk the streets without being insulted, when all gates save the Jews’ gate were closed against them, it was terribly difficult to bring up children to be good Jews and good citizens at the same time. Mendelssohn did not altogether succeed with his children. ‘Who is best taught?’ says the Talmud; and it answers, ‘He who has learned first from his mother.’ Mendelssohn’s clever boys and girls never seem to have had that teaching, and this may account in part for the mistakes they made when they grew up. They became impatient of the obstacles and the insults that beset the Jews’ path, and when their turn came to marry and bring up children, they determined to save them all such humiliating experiences by bringing them up as Christians. Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, the great musician, was the grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, but he was not a Jew.